Chapter 3
Focusing on Technique
In This Chapter
Getting acquainted with the Raspberry Pi operating system
Using the desktop and the Linux shell
Brushing up on programming
The easiest way to get know your Raspberry Pi is to play around with the Raspbian Wheezy operating system and familiarize yourself with what it can do. As soon as your Raspberry Pi finishes starting up, you can interact with the operating system in two ways:
- From the command-line interface, often referred to as the “shell”
- With the graphical user interface (GUI), the “desktop environment” people are most familiar with, called Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE)
Raspberry Pi also has software to support writing your own software. The two software programming environments we use in this book are Python and C.
In this chapter, we cover the basics you need to know to use the Raspberry Pi operating system using the command line and LXDE and show what you need to know to get started writing programs in Python and C. We also show you how to download and install new software to use when you’re writing code.
Getting Around Your Raspberry Pi
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